Twitter Says Record Number of Tweets Posted During Women's World Cup Finals

Twitter says a record number of Tweets per second (TPS) were sent out during the Women's World Cup final match between Japan and the U.S.

Did you watch the Women's World Cup over the weekend? Did you Tweet about it? The U.S.A. women's soccer team lost to Japan in a shootout in the finals of the tournament on Sunday, and it appears if you were following the game on Twitter, you were in good company. By the end of the game, soccer fans set a new record for the number tweets posted per second.

Twitter tweeted that by the end of the Women's World Cup final, users were sending out a record 7,196 tweets per second (TPS). The Paraguay/Brazil game came close to matching that number too, setting the record for the second-highest number of TPS with 7,166.

The previous record for TPS was 6,939, set in Japan on New Year's Eve. A significant number of tweets were also posted earlier this year when President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed, with the number of TPS hitting a peak of 5,106. Twitter pointed out that this announcement prompted the highest sustained rate of tweets ever.

Other events that brought a huge number of TPS this year have been the Royal Wedding with 3,966 TPS, the Super Bowl with 4,064 TPS, and the day of the March earthquake in Japan with 5,530 TPS.

Last summer, a record for TPS was set during the Men's World Cup, but the number of tweets sent out during the Women's World Cup vastly trumped that figure. At the time, a record number of 3,051 TPS were posted. However, Twitter has grown quite a bit since then.

Leslie Horn joined the PCMag team as a news reporter in the fall of 2010. She covers a wide range of topics from digital media to the latest Apple rumor. After graduating with a degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Missouri, she wrote for Out & About, a travel guide in coastal Maine. One of her favorite reporting experiences was covering the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. She travels every chance she gets, and recently spent time backpacking along the coast of Brazil. Though she...
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